When one thinks of memory, they usually think of past events that happened or something that they had learned. Although one can recall certain memories, can they recall every single detail? This semester, we were asked to recall the events of a day that happened six weeks prior to the beginning of class. While some students could explain some details of what they had done that day, not all could be certain. Details may not seem to be that important when telling a story from a childhood experience or maybe the retelling of a joke, but what if a person was made to recall a memory that took place six weeks ago? This may not seem crucial, however, what if this inability to recall what happened that day could possibly ruin someone’s life? This appears…
Memory and personal identity are an integral part of our lives. These characteristics and traits assist us in the way we make decisions and approach situations. Memory in relation to personal identity is a topic that has been studied by several Philosophers. The question of whether or not memory presupposes identity is a circular one, and therefore makes this question important. To study this, I looked at Parfits theory of Psychological continuity, and how it was seen as problematic due to its…
Empowering poetry allows a poet to relate to their audience through universal ideas of death and loss and the consolation brought by childhood memories. Gwen Harwood’s Father and Child and focuses on a recollection of childhood memories that deeply impacted her perspective on mortality and her relationship with her father. The mirroring structure of the Father and Child depicts a complete role reversal between the persona and her father, showing a switch in comforting each other in the face of…
Music has the power to transporting us back to a particular experience, memory, or era without that being its intended purpose. The documentary, Alive Inside, provided a look into how the brain’s reaction to music for nursing home residents with dementia provided an alternative therapy by allowing them to temporarily regain the memories and movement of their younger years. At the suggestion of Dan Cohen, social worker, nursing home volunteer and non-profit organizer of Music & Memory, the film’s…
After 16 weeks of antidepressant treatment, only the SRT delayed recall (effect size=0.45, p=0.000) discriminated best between the OSA group and the non-OSA group whereas the SRT immediate recalls (adjusted effect size=0.45, p=0.07) and recognition (adjusted effect size=-0.06, p=0.51) did not. (See Table 2 and Figure 1). Our findings are consistent with the results from two meta-analysis studies investigated memory function in OSA compared to age-matched norms, showing that OSA most frequently…
pieces of their memory, both good and bad, and make their past into what they want others to understand and believe about themselves. One can also use past memories to reflect who they are today. Patricia Hampl, an American memoirist and poet, wrote an article titled “Memory and Imagination,” in which she recalls her first piano lesson. In her recollection, she soon discovers that the way she believed things had happened and the way she explained them may not have actually been the way they…
Jaeger, T., & Long, S. (2007). Effects Of Contour Proximity And Lightness On Delboeuf Illusions Created By Circumscribed Letters. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 105(5), 253. doi:10.2466/pms.105.5.253-260 Jaegar and Long conducted a study on how having large surrounding circles and reducing the lightness contrast of the outer ring can decrease the effects of the Delboeuf and circumscribed letters illusions. For their experiment, researchers printed out illusion figures, which had circles that had…
and take little space in terms of specific areas of the brain; however, the visual areas are simultaneously involved with many areas of the brain during sight. Vision is said to involve at least fifty percent of the brain as it is working with other sensory areas, such as touch, spatial, motor, etc. ("Vision: A Collaboration of Eyes and Brain", 2004). After the eye takes in light and the brain processes what it is seeing, memory becomes involved and starts indexing different recorded sensations…
Memory is an area of cognition that is thought to both be affected by, and be an integral part of the substance abuse cycle. Whereas addiction was once believed to be attributed to a lack of willpower, or flaws of character, much of the current understanding realizes it is a complex interplay between individual genetic, biological, developmental, and environmental characteristics (Koob & Volkow, 2009). The overreaching scope of this paper is to examine the connections between addiction and…
individual’s memory. Hence, one may not only view the self as a concept or as an image, but also “think of the self as one’s memory for oneself” (Klein). Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind sets the focus on this dynamic, examining the impairment imposed on its characters’ perception of their own identity caused by the selective memory erasure. The film portrays the disruption of the consciousness engendered by labored forgetting. As its protagonists struggle with existential crises as a…